[Matthew Belinkie]

Thanks a lot. I was actually led astray by this School of Motion guide:

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/anchor-point-expressions-in-after-effects

It explains the expressions very well except the variables they use simply won’t work right. Hard to believe they missed that, but just changing the variables to simple letters corrects it.

[Matthew Belinkie]

Thank you! I’ll see if I can make this work.

[Matthew Belinkie]

Tried it, doesn’t quite work. The resulting file is mpeg instead of mp4 (which might not matter) but it’s almost twice as big as the two source files. It’s not just stitching them together.

[Matthew Belinkie]

If ONLY it were that simple. Trust me, I’ve fallen for that before, but this is something way more stubborn. Even when I put the files in a 44100 sequence, the sync is way off. Even when I play the files in the VIEWER, no sequence involved, the sync is way off. Premiere just hates these files. But when I open the originals in Quicktime, they play totally fine.

I did discover a time-consuming workaround. I bring the mp4 files into Final Cut Pro 7, drop them on a timeline, let the sequence conform to whatever format it thinks the mpg files are, and then export that. Then I have a Quicktime .mov file that is mysteriously 50% larger than the original mp4.

That STILL doesn’t sync in Premiere. However, I can bring that .mov file into compressor and convert it to an MPEG-2. Bingo, that works fine. It takes forever but at least it works.

The best I can figure (and this is just a guess) there’s either a variable frame rate thing going on, or maybe the occassional frames that are corrupted. Quicktime handles this stuff different than Premiere to keep video and audio in sync. I just needed to find a way to convert the file to preserve the sync that Premiere would work with.

[Matthew Belinkie]

Sounds like After Effects will be a lot easier for this kind of automation. The problem is these hundreds of VO clips – I’m recording a lot of clips at a time and counting on Premiere for editing. It might be worth it to use Premiere to edit the audio and export lots of little voiceover clips, THEN use a spreadsheet to have AE stitch it all together, combining Photoshops and VO to build all the comps. I guess I’d still have to adjust the timing of each AE master comp, since each precomp will be a different length.

[Matthew Belinkie]

Here’s a short clip of what I’m working on:
https://vimeo.com/75707955

The car is zipping around a track which is almost 4000 pixels wide. I want to make the ground seem like pavement, not just a smooth plane. Maybe I could get away with a 4000×4000 texture layer for the ground, with a larger layer underneath with NO texture that gives the effect of it stretching endlessly to the horizon? But even a 4000×4000 image will make my computer sad.

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[Matthew Belinkie]

Can you explain a little more? If you’re talking about leaving the car stationary and moving the ground to create the illusion of forward motion, I don’t see how that helps. The ground still has to move as much as the car would, so the layer has to be just as big.

Maybe what I can do is make the ground a medium size layer at 500%, but then put smaller patches of high res ground texture on top of that wherever the camera is going to stop. So just in the spots where the camera isn’t moving, you get the full res texture?

[Matthew Belinkie]

I can’t just animate the texture because the whole point is to see the car moving OVER the texture. The texture gives the car a sense of scale and speed. If the texture is parented to the car’s motion, then the car looks like it’s standing still. Maybe what I need is a 2000×2000 layer, and duplicate it 16 times to make an 8000×8000 grid. Will AE like that better than one giant layer?

[Matthew Belinkie]

I believe that most MKV files have plain old H.264 codecs inside. I think that in this case, it really is the wrapper that is slowing down the program. When I open an MKV file, the timeline of the video fills up slowly, as if the video is being decoded on the fly. If I want to move the playhead to a point near the end of the video, I have to wait a few minutes for the timeline to fill up to that point. Any other format video would let me open a file and instantly scrub to the end, but not MKV. It’s not ideal, but as I mentioned, I don’t know of any other programs that can open MKV files at all. Compressor can’t do, Adobe Media Encoder can’t do it, Episode can’t do it, etc. There are programs that will re-wrap the MKV file in and MP4 file, but that would take even longer.

Incidentally, VLC plays MKV files flawlessly, with no slowdown or scrubbing problems. It’s rotten at transcoding, though.

[Matthew Belinkie]

Ah well. Thanks for the advice, but if I’m going to convert these clips, I might as well do it at full quality. I tend to go way overboard with video quality, which is why I’m converting MKV files that are probably compressed at 3000kbps to ProRes, which has a bitrate 30 times higher.

I love Streamclip, which I’ve been using to convert media for years and years. It worries me, however, that the Mac version hasn’t seen an update in almost a year. Might have to look into alternatives.